Another 'Hill' to climb

I just had to pick the computer with the gi-normous screen, huh?\nOkay, maybe it's not that large. But I feel like I'm Web browsing on a Jumbotron when I try to secretly view BET's "College Hill" homepage.\nA click on smelly-guy Jabari's picture and I'm linked to last week's recap. It deals with equally infamous cast member Kinda.\n"Kinda fights the 'ho' label." \nI'm downright embarrassed to check out this site in public but can't help myself. \nIn fact, I printed off the press release, read through some articles--everything but voted for "Cutest Cast Member."\nHere I am in the Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center with a myriad of new books and a myriad of reasons to do something more productive than laugh at the ignorance of "television's first-ever Black dramatic reality show" -- but I'm chuckling nonetheless.\nA "College Hill" information blurb on BET's Web site describes the show as "Eight college co-eds; a popular Black college campus in the hot Louisiana sun; challenging class work …" \nHold up. Challenging class work?!\nShooting silent footage of students in a classroom does not constitute notions of academia. From the little but all-too-much footage I've seen, I only remember Kinda saying, "They call me 'no drawers'." \nLike all reality TV shows, "College Hill" works on a foundation of stereotypes. There's cheerleader/diva Nina, Kevin the jock, wannabe rapper Delano, who's-baby-is-it Shalondrea, frat guy Gabriel, Veronica the rich chick and, of course, aforementioned "Wild Child" Kinda and Jabari the Weird One. \nI thought it was mainstream television's job to stereotype black folks as less than intelligent, easily-categorized, caricatures of Blackness. But sadly, BET hopped on that train a long time ago.\nThe show's producer, Tracy Edmonds, argues "College Hill" is different from other reality shows because it deals with issues specific to black college life on a black campus.\n"Shalondrea, our sophomore, is pregnant, and so while she's navigating going through the academic side of her life, she's also trying to figure out who her baby's father is," says Edmonds in an interview with CNN's Daryn Kagan. "So there's a lot of things we haven't seen before."\nBut haven't we?\nBaby mamas, athletes and divas are nothing new to the black community's hip-hop generation. But the media, Edmonds included, continue to bait the generation with lame shows like "College Hill."\nMaybe it's because she thinks black youth are anti-intellectual. In fact, more than one of my black professors has expressed great concern regarding, what they call, an attitude of anti-intellectualism among their younger brothas and sistas. \nWriter Bakari Kitwani, in his book "The Hip-Hop Generation," says young blacks strengthen "associations between Blackness and poverty, while celebrating anti-intellectualism, ignorance, irresponsible parenthood and criminal lifestyles." \nBut what some of our predecessors fail to see is that experiencing the murder of Amadou Diallo, exposing ourselves to thinkers like recent IU lecturer Cornel West and taking in all those lessons about the Freedom Rides will have/have had an impact on us.\n Well-intentioned and infinitely-wise older generations often overlook the Sarah Jones, Talib Kwelis, Eboni Gatlins and Eric Williams of our generation.\nInstead, they often judge us by the same narrow scope of popular images of black youth culture the rest of society relies on which.\n"We say 'the youth are our future,'" said IU lecturer and economist Julianne Malveaux. "At some point, we have to start believing it."\n We are the "College Hill" kids, their opposites and everything in-between. Maybe we won't resurrect the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or March on Washington. But our methods of activism, ways of expression and scope of intellect will prove just as unconventional, influential and far-reaching as the music our generation's named after.\nTo our concerned brothas and sistas: Despite your worries, you say we have potential. \nWe believe you're right.